After I threw in money for my startup, I haven’t got any paychecks for 5 months. During this period, my income are my competition awards and two lecture fees. It seems that I have good relationship with Taipei Medical University Hospital. They invited me to give a speech. They could be my first long-term customer. I had interviewed three candidates so far. The last one is what impressed me most. His background is not Computer Science, but he loved solving any problems with programming. He can even bring in paid-projects from other companies.

8/3 is the welcome day for AppWorks #17. I am lucky to get accepted into this program. It helps startups to grow from 0 to 1 to many. I overheard that sometimes it can bring 1 to -1. Starting a new business is hard, but with so many founders and co-founders sitting together, I felt the passion around us. People really have great ideas. By talking with smart people, we can inspire new ideas, or new business models.

For startup, we don’t know exactly what the market needs, but we just go out and launch apps, events one by one. Hopefully, one can get traction. It’s like trying out different ideas and see which one really works, and which one the market is willing to open their wallets to pay you. It’s just the beginning, little by little, how to manage a business in terms of talents recruiting, sufficient funding to support, product or service support, customer relationship will come out.

I am excited to start my own business, and I already feel that I learn a lot comparing to staying in big companies. I wear multiple hats, sometimes I am a sales guy, sometimes I am a marketing guy, posting blogs, maintaining facebook fan page. Sometimes I am a project manager, need to organize workloads to make sure important and urgent things got higher priority to be done. The journey is so different than what I experienced before, and I really enjoy it.

There are more and more Gogoro Electric cars in Taipei. Even my wife is thinking to change her old motorcycle to it. Although the energy price for daily commute might be more expensive than traditional oil car, some customers already buy them. I think it’s just a matter of time that traditional motorcycles will be replaced by this.

I searched online about the history of Gogoro. The original idea of 陸學森 was to create portable energy solution. Somehow the business has been changed to the full solution of electric car. When someone starts a new business, vision and direction are important. Once the direction is set, try every way to make it happen. In the middle, if the business model of selling energy solution is not making money, try bigger ideas, give the total solution. The market doesn’t like to have a partial solution, because they need to assemble piece by piece on its own. Instead, think bigger, build total solution to solve others’ problems.

Last year, we had pumpkin carving. I saved some pumpkin seeds and put them into a pot. Seeds just stayed in the pot for the whole winter, and nothing happened. This spring, the seeds started to germinate, and I didn’t pay too much attention in the beginning. I saw stems and small leaves. When it gets hotter and hotter, the green leaves were turning yellow. Maybe it’s because I didn’t water enough, or maybe it’s too crowded for plants. I decided to transplant them into bigger space. I knew pumpkin is like vine, and it can grow sporadically. I found a small space and mixed fertilizer into the soil, then transplanted unhealthy pumpkin plants into it. This time, more water was kept in the soil because I monitored it more often. About one month or two months later, some flowers start to come out. I can also see small pumpkins. To tell the difference between female pumpkin flowers and male pumpkin flowers, please see the below pictures. Female flower already has a tiny pumpkin below flower, and the stigma has 4 small pieces on the top. Male flower has a smaller stamen, and no tiny pumpkin below flower.

Some friends were discussing what we could do differently in summer. So this time, let’s try crabbing. We were not sure about whether it requires fishing license to do crabbing. We were not sure in the beginning where we should go because there are many piers in San Francisco bay. Finally, we decided to go to Berkeley Marina. There are also rules about which crabs you can take home. Like right now, between July and November, you are not allowed to catch Dungeness crab. You are not allowed to catch female crab. You can take it home when it is over 5 and 3/4 inches. Each person can only take maximum 6 crabs home. A introduction of crabbing on youtube is attached.

It’s really quick to catch them. You just need to drop your net to the water, wait for about 10 minutes, then you pull the net up, you can see a few of them. Some are big and some are small. Some people are concerned about the pollution in the bay so they don’t want to eat what we caught. Some people feel pity for these little creatures. We took home with larger size crabs. They are really afraid of our tap water. Maybe because there is fluoride in it or there is no salt in the water. You can see the picture that our trophy lying in the sink tank.

During this long weekend, I went to Sequoia National Park with some of my softball teammates and some friends. This national park is famous for big trees and stalactite. We left San Jose on Friday evening, and stopped at Fresno, CA. In the national park, there is no cell phone signal, so it’s really hard for our three cars to communicate with each other. We spent too much time waiting for other cars or people. I have watched Oregon’s redwood forest last year, but the feeling for trees in Sequoia National Park is slightly different. It’s more geared to tourism. It’s not as nature as trees in Oregon’s redwood forest. I have posted some photos below. You can see there are signs beside big trees.

Before we left the national park, we went to a beautiful high point, Moro Rock. We could see the valley and mountains around us. It’s really amazing. It made me feel that I stood on the top of a mountain.